Emotional Design; Application of a Research-Based Design Approach

In this paper, we discuss an approach to ‘design for wow’ that focuses on the emotions that constitute a wow-experience. In this approach, the eliciting conditions of these emotions are used to define a product character with a high wow-impact. In addition to the approach, a measurable wow-index is introduced. First, a concept of wow is described in which wow is explained as a combination of fascination, pleasant surprise, and desire. The eliciting conditions of these three emotions are examined and combined to a ‘wow-appraisal.’ This concept is applied in the design of a mobile telephone. A combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods was used to formulate concern themes relevant for the wow-appraisal. These themes were used to create a layered product character and a prototype of the final design. An evaluation study demonstrated that the product designed with this approach rated higher on the wow-index than alternative products.     

Sober on Intelligent Design

This response to Sober's (2008) Evidence and Evolution draws out and criticizes some consequences of his analysis because of its reliance on a likelihood framework for adjucating the dispute between (Intelligent Design) creationism and evolution. In particular, Sober's analysis does not allow it to be formally claimed that evolutionary theory better explains living phenomena than Intelligent Design and makes irrelevant the contribution of the theory of evolution by natural selection to assessments of the status of the argument from design. Finally, a rudimentary alternative framework for theory confirmation is presented here which avoids these conclusions by rejecting likelihoodism and deploying multiple criteria to the problem of scientific theory choice.     

Fairness in Technological Design

This paper addresses an important multi-disciplinary issue of current interest, that is, the implications of technological design for fairness. A visual, graphical methodology centered on the Taylor-Russell diagram is proposed to address this issue. The Taylor-Russell diagram helps to identify and explore ways in which predictions built into designs can pit the interests of different constituencies against one another. The configuration of the design represents a trade-off between the interests of the communities involved. Whether or not the trade-off is appropriate constitutes a problem of fairness or distributive justice. The breadth of this methodology is supported by a diversity of examples analyzed. These include a surveillance system, an automotive safety system, a civic information system, and the international food distribution system. These examples provide models for application of the methodology to the analysis of designs in further areas of concern. Limitations of the methodology are also discussed. While it helps to identify and clarify issues of fairness in technology design, the methodology does not provide a general theory of fairness, nor can it provide fair solutions to such issues without appeal to further principles or concepts.     

Design in the Local Economy: Location Factors and Externalities of Design

This article deals with the relation between design and local economy. The study explains the mechanisms, which lead innovative and knowledge intensive activities to concentrate in metropolises and major cities. In addition, there is a tendency that within cities, these activities concentrate to certain locations. Intensive and easy communication with deep social dimension connected to it creates positive externalities and spillover effects of knowledge. This is fruitful not only for the design business itself but also to a large extent to other innovative activities. The location of design industry is illustrated by empirical data in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Finland. Design has a great significance for brand and value creation processes of many important, global businesses, like mobile phone industry or machinery, in addition to design industries itself. Via this, link design firms together with research and education institutions are an important part of the global industrial clusters.     

The Random Stimulus Design

In the 1960s, a methodological advancement of significant proportion occured with the development of single case research designs in the field of appleid behavior analysis. Among the methods popularized were the multiple baseline, reversal, and, more recently, the alternating treatment designs. Despite the flexibility and wide applicability of each of these single subject designs, there are conditions under which none of them are appropriate. For example, when limited subjects are available and when repeated presentation of the same stimuli result in improvement due to practice effects of decremental effects due to boredom or habituation, problems arise. To offset this difficulty, the investigators describe a new single case design, the random stimulus design. This design is so named becuase an item pool of equal stimuli is established and then items are randomly selected and assigned to one of several cohorts. Cohorts are then assessed in the typical withdrawal or reversal manner.     

Program Structure and Design

Most models of computer programming explain the programmer's behaviour by a single design strategy. This article presents a cognitive architecture that uses cue-based search to model multiple design strategies including procedural, functional, means-end or focal, and opportunistic design. The model has been implemented in an artificial intelligence (AI) system that generates Pascal programs from English specifications. Knowledge is represented as nodes that reside in internal or external memory, where a node encodes an action that may range from a line of code to a routine in size. A program is built by linking nodes through a search cue of the form <role, goal, object>. The cue is broadcast to memory, and any matching node is returned; the cue provides a question to ask, and the return provides the answer. A cue on the newly linked node is then selected as a new focus, and the search process repeated. Each design strategy defines a specific node visiting order that traverses the program structure through its links.     

Design and its discontents

The design argument was rebutted by David Hume. He argued that the world and its contents (such as organisms) were not analogous to human artifacts. Hume further suggested that there were equally plausible alternatives to design to explain the organized complexity of the cosmos, such as random processes in multiple universes, or that matter could have inherent properties to self-organize, absent any external crafting. William Paley, writing after Hume, argued that the functional complexity of living beings, however, defied naturalistic explanations. In effect he dared anyone to come up with an alternative to his inference to design, and hence a designer, outside of nature. Charles Darwin explained the apparent design of functional complexity by his theory of natural selection. Asa Gray, however, in essays as well as in correspondence with Darwin argued that natural selection allowed for a type of ‘evolutionary teleology’ in which design at most could be considered the result of universal principles. F.E. Hicks updated Hume by specifically objecting to the use of design arguments by Paley. Hicks argued that the apparent design seen in nature reflected order at a deep level in nature. The design argument was briefly revived by Lawrence Henderson early in the twentieth century but he ultimately concluded that design and teleology were not necessarily mutually entailing and he retracted his design argument in favor of one that he termed ‘natural teleology’. The current claims of ‘intelligent design’ have the same logical problems that have beset previous design arguments. If design is divorced from teleology and its discontents put behind us, then there is a possibility that the latter can have a place in the development of theories to explain the phenomena of emergent complexity.     

Learning to Design Systems

This article describes a brief overview of systems design concepts, and provides an example of the use of one very simple framework for utilizing systems design. Its purpose is to demonstrate the value of even the simplest of systems design models in clarifying the issues behind what are often perceived to be organizational conflicts. The example provided is that of a medical function within an industrial organization, but the implications apply to almost any support function or department found within a large organization.     

Nick Thompson on Design

Most biologists are struck by the many close fits between organisms’ characteristics and the environments which they inhabit. The adaptations look as they have been designed, but their origins are explained in terms of Charles Darwin’s natural selection. Nick Thompson, to whom this essay is dedicated, frequently wrote about design and insisted that the concept should not treated in the same way as the notion of current utility, the idea that an organism’s trait increases its chances of survival and reproductive success. He was right, but sadly the whole idea of design has been appropriated by the creationists seeking scientific respectability for their extremist nonsense. As a result biologists are now shy about using the term.     

Design Fixation in the Wild: Design Environments and Their Influence on Fixation

Many studies of design fixation ask designers to work in controlled laboratory or classroom environments, but innovative design work frequently occurs in dynamic, social environments. The two studies reviewed in this paper investigated how three independent variables likely to be present in many design environments affect design fixation. The first study found that working with physical prototypes significantly reduced fixation effects, and that working in groups can reduce fixation effects under certain conditions. The second study found that brief interruptions in designers' thought processes during the initial states of the design process also reduce fixation effects. I conclude by discussing what the data from both studies may indicate about the theoretical causes of fixation effects, and what designers might do to prevent fixation from affecting their creative output.     

《ARCS兴趣问卷》的编制

本研究以凯勒的“ARCS模型”作为理论基础,以“激励策略”作为载体和表现形式。经过开放式调查以及对教师和学生的访谈,编制了《ARCS兴趣问卷》。被试是北京师范大学附属实验小学4、5年级8个班的349名学生,施测了《ARCS兴趣问卷》。对4年级的4个班还施测了《IMMS》和《CIE&CES》问卷。对《ARCS兴趣问卷》的项目进行了筛选和修订,最后保留49条项目。对《ARCS兴趣问卷》的信度和效度进行了考察,总体来看,问卷的信度和效度都比较好。研究表明注意与切身性相关,自信心与满意相关。     

Sex Bias in Research Design

Feminist criticisms of selected aspects of research methods in psychology are presented. Data relevant to sex bias in topic selection, subject selection and single-sex designs, operationalization of variables, testing for sex differences, and interpretation of results are reviewed. Suggestions for achieving more "sex fair" research methods are discussed in terms of a more meticulous application of scientific method and an awareness of the sometimes subtle ways in which a sexist culture influences the research process.     

Design considerations for multidimensional scaling

This paper begins with a short tutorial on multidimensional scaling. The focus of the remainder of the paper is on the proper designing of research that will use multidimensional scaling analysis techniques and includes suggestions for the interpretation of results.